Quick Hitters

I.
I finished reading Evelyn Waugh's Officers and Gentlemen a few weeks ago, and didn't know quite how to put my thoughts together about the sad, darkly funny ending. The title character (Guy Crouchback) ends up joining the Royal Halbediers at the outbreak of WWII out of a sense of honor (or honour, properly) and ends up discovering there is no longer such a thing in the modern world. The novel ends with the surrender of Crete and a dark conversation about how 100 years ago duels were a necessary part of the honorable life, but now there is no longer any honor tied up in the practice. Yet somewhere between then and now was the awkward moment at which all the honor was ebbing out of the institution. Crouchback looks at warfare (or at least soldiering as it was conceived and attempted in Britain) and finds it somewhere between an honorable and a ridiculous activity, moving fatally towards the ridiculous.
I asked J whether there were any such activities in the modern world, to which honor (or honour) is such a binding pressure. We couldn't come up with any, and I couldn't even think of a way to properly describe what honor is. I still don't have a good working definition, but I think I had a bit of a revelation than honor is NOT something that ends up being tied into an ideology. For a principle to be honorable, it has to run deeper than that. Ideologies (this all comes from having read Oakeshott recently) appear a posteriori to the real world, and a principle thus deeply ingrained has to either have been inherited earlier or been made native by some means other than intellectual abstraction. Thus, it's impossible to have any sense of honor about the sexes when one's conception of the sexes is primarily ideological, and the same thing goes for politics and warfare.
If everyone could write up a quick five page paper on the topic of honor in the modern world and email it to me, that'd be great. I look forward to your submissions.

II.
That Oakeshott essay was great. I'm doing my darndest to read the best of the historical conservatives this summer. Also on the list are William F. Buckley, Richard Neuhaus, de Tocqueville, and Edmund Burke. I'm thinking now about the past as an inheritance, avoiding knowledge as a reduction to technique, and wondering what exactly the American political tradition (worth keeping) exactly is. One thing that Oakeshott doesn't talk about (at least in Rationalism in Politics) is the importance of how you tell the story of history in order to spell out what exactly you ARE inheriting from the tradition that goes before you.

III.
I've read two sad books in the last two days, first Of Mice of Men almost all in one sitting yesterday, and now Cry, the Beloved Country. I'd forgotten how much I love Cry, the Beloved Country. I don't particularly resonate with African literature, but everything in that novel touches me as a Christian. It is absolutely the best novel I've ever read in dealing with race, injustice, grief, and somehow prayer in the midst of it all. As dark and hopeless as Of Mice and Men is, Cry, the Beloved Country brims over with a real hope in the midst of its tragedy. They were good books to read back-to-back.

--He is a stranger, he said, I cannot touch him, I cannot reach him. I see no shame in him, no pity for those he has hurt. Tears come out of his eyes, but it seems that he weeps only for himself, not for his wickedness, but for his danger.
The man cried out, can a person lose all sense of evil? A boy, brought up as he was brought up? I see only his pity for himself, he who has made two children fatherless.

It's about such things that our own tribe most needs authentic Christian hope.